Page 36

With great difficulty due to women and children streaming in the opposite direction, Darcy climbed the staircase to the boat deck and thought he would see for himself if men were being taken off the port side.

If there were enough lifeboats for everyone, there was no reason he should “stand upon the burning deck” as it were and go down with the ship.

Now that Elizabeth and Lydia were safely away, he could think about saving himself, if indeed that was necessary.

As he reached the boat deck, the portside boats were away already.

By this time, a definite tilt to the bow kept him steadying his stance, and Darcy’s worst fears were confirmed.

They were sinking and sinking quickly. He might not survive this night.

He returned to the first-class deck, where a crewman blocked the way of a second-class passenger.

“No, madame, you may not enter here, but go to a boat on the B deck, in second class.” The woman didn’t seem to be alarmed and thanked the man for his directions.

The scene was worse on the second-class deck.

Women and children from both second class and steerage were the only persons allowed on the boats.

That was as it should be. If he was to die tonight, then he should make himself useful whilst he still had time.

He approached the B deck lifeboats, where a steward still reassured passengers. “You need to get into the lifeboat only as a precaution, madame. This ship cannot sink.”

Most of the women obeyed placidly, many still clad in nightclothes with coats hastily thrown over. Darcy positioned himself near the railing and, extending his hand to a mother carrying an infant, and helped her negotiate the expanse between the ship and the swinging boat.

“ Lev… Lev ,” she called as soon as she landed in the boat.

Dressed in a worn overcoat and no doubt her husband, a young man stood stock-still on the deck.

With a long beard, sidelocks, and a faded muffler about his neck, he kept his expression sedate, but Darcy could see by his trembling lip that he could barely contain himself at their parting.

“ You, sir.”

Darcy looked about.

“ Are you addressing me?” he asked as he helped another woman and her two children into the boat.

“ Yes. There’s room in the boat for you, sir,” he said.

All heads turned towards him. He looked down at his clothes momentarily.

The silk scarf, the smartly tailored black overcoat with velvet collar.

In an instant, he knew he was being given a place because he was a first-class passenger.

He swallowed hard. This one moment would test everything he believed in…

honour, duty, the unwritten code of a gentleman.

He also knew that he now, literally, held his life in his hands.

Glancing around at the upturned faces, he spotted the young man, Lev, still rooted to the spot where he let his wife and baby go.

Darcy gestured to him. “Go,” he said. “They need you.”

The young man looked about in disbelief.

The sailor made no protest. The boat, fully laden, was already being swung by the divets out over the black water.

His overcoat billowing, the young father leapt from a nearly standing position and threw himself into the boat.

A cry went up from one or two of the female passengers, upon whom he had landed.

As he rose up from the bottom of the boat, he called out to Darcy in a loud voice.

“Thank you, thank you. What is your name?”

“ Darcy, Fitzwilliam Darcy.”

“ I am Lev Shklovsky. We will never forget you.” The boat began to disappear over the side.

Darcy walked back to the rail and looked over, watching what was probably his last hope of rescue disappear down the great wall of the ship.

Straightening himself, he took a deep breath, and looked down the deck where other boats were being loaded.

Wickham?

At least he thought he saw Wickham rushing down the deck as more women and children were hastily loaded into the straining boats.

Darcy shifted over just as a pink-cheeked lad of perhaps thirteen years of age was dragged from under the seat of lifeboat 14. An officer aimed a pistol in the lad’s direction. screaming, “I’ll give you just ten seconds to get on that ship before I blow your brains out.”

The boy raised his hands. “Please, sir, don’t shoot. Let me stay. I won’t take up much room. Please .”

The officer lowered his weapon. “Be a man.”

The boy stood up in the lifeboat, then swung himself back onto the deck of the Titanic , where he sat down and wept.

More life-and-death decisions unfolded around Darcy.

Men begging their wives to take the children, reassuring them that they would find another boat.

Women weeping. For a moment he stood at the rail, breathing in deeply the frigid air.

The realisation that he would die that night struck him with full force.

For a few moments he watched the sobbing boy on the deck.

The poor child was asked to be a man. Darcy was a man, and a gentleman, and would act like one to the end.

There was no point in doing anything else.

Perhaps it would make up for his murderous thoughts of the other night. Was it only yesterday?

The squeaking of the divets swinging lifeboat 14 over the side wrenched him from his reverie and forced his attention back on Wickham. He had seen him. As the boat swung out from the deck on its divets, ready to be lowered, he scanned the faces of the crowd.

Pacing the deck and looking intently at the passengers in the lifeboat, a rather broad-shouldered female shielded her face by looking out into the blackness of the sky and sea. Something about her looked familiar. When someone bumped her and she shifted to retain her balance, Darcy froze.

With all the noise on deck, the screaming funnels, the shouting men, he didn’t expect his voice to carry, but— “ Wickham .”

The sailors loosened their ropes to lower the craft on its seven-story journey to the glassy surface of the ocean.

As the boat slipped from view, the “woman” turned to look in Darcy’s direction and he smirked and gave a feminine sort of four-fingered wave.

That was the last Darcy saw of George Wickham.

***

Hope still beat in Lizzy’s breast that the rockets that came howling from the deck into the placid night sky might be seen by some other ship that was invisible to them, and at this moment, would be steaming to their rescue.

The Titanic ’s black monolithic size looming above them would last the night, surely.

Its great structure dwarfed their tiny boats like an elephant beside an ant.

How could such a thing topple and sink into the sea? It couldn’t. Everyone said so.

She swore she caught a ship in the distance, one of those tiny points of light that flashed at the razor cut of the black horizon.

Not a star, but a ship. It had to be. It would come and take all who were left behind, including Mr Darcy.

Take them off the behemoth and scoop their boat up, too, one by one.

Then, by morning, all the tearful departures, all the sacrifice, all the high emotion and grief would be gone, and all would be reunited with their loved ones, and she with her beloved.

Why hadn’t she told him of her feelings sooner?

Darcy was in many ways exactly what she thought of him the first time she met him: proud, moody, ensconced in his upper-class ways.

And yet she’d misjudged him so. He wasn’t arrogant or cruel.

He was capable of deep thought … of altering his first impression and even the beliefs that had been instilled since childhood. And he loved her.

Where was the rescue ship? Why hadn’t it come to their aid?

One of the oarsmen who claimed to be one of the engine stokers shivered in his shirt and trousers, having been dressed for the heat of the engine room.

Now he was afloat in this windless, icy night.

A lady, well dressed in a fur, offered him her coat, but he wouldn’t take it.

He did avail himself of a rug that that self-same lady brought with her.

It was obvious that he couldn’t wrap himself in it and keep on rowing, so Elizabeth volunteered to take his place at the oars.

No one objected, and she watched him disappear below the stern in an effort to roll himself into a ball, covering himself with the rug in an attempt to prevent himself from freezing to death.

“ The water is so still. Isn’t it, Lizzy?

” Lydia stayed as close to Elizabeth as she dared while she rowed.

Elizabeth, preoccupied as she was with rowing their lifeboat away from the great wounded beast of a ship, finally looked at the glossy sea.

Except for a slight bobbing motion, almost indiscernible from stillness, her oar cut into what looked like a great pond of oil, it was so without ripple or wave.

“ Let us heave and move to more open water, for if she does go down, she’s such a size that she’d suck us all into a watery grave with her,” the crewman who captained the lifeboat ordered. They rowed out into the frigid night, at one with the glittering stars and the lifeless sea.

“ Never seen the stars so bright in all me life,” said someone. It was true. There wasn’t a hint of mist nor cloud and the brilliant swath of the Milky Way shown like a wispy tapestry across the sky.

From her position at the oar, Elizabeth watched the lights of the portholes in the Titanic , reflected in the still ocean. Slowly, they lost their parallel position to the sea’s surface, and the lights met their counterpart reflections in an arrow pointing to their destruction.